Facile Distraction: Never Leave Home Again

Dec 2, 2009

The more I look around, the more I realize that the contributions of our generations involve the meta frames of culture. We refine pre-existing structures. We seek to improve the smaller, finer details of daily interaction through self improvement and seminars, we try to make the world a more beautiful place through graphic/interior/visual design.

The things we DO create are entirely virtual: Youtube, blogging, iPhone applications. While this is well and good, it almost feels like we've lost our way. In discovering that we can make our own virtual realms with ease, fixing the physical world has fallen to the backburner. It's simply less efficient that "solving" that problem virtually.

The Internet makes it possible to dive into a multitude of international experiences that we would otherwise be unable to achieve---such that it has become our playground. The problem is that its rapidly becoming our ONLY playground. People live and DIE playing WoW, marriages get broken apart by Second Life, some dude just married his DS.

But what about reality. What ever happened to the physical world. I just finished watching this and the entire time, all I could think of was....why haven't we implemented any of these yet?

The internet is partly to blame. Because we're constantly plugged into a constant source of amusement and emotional stimuli, we no longer NEED physical experiences to keep our neverending drive for novelty quelled.

This isn't what I have a problem with, per se. I will be the first to admit I have a minor YouTube addiction. The problem comes when this behavior starts limiting our beliefs--when all of a sudden doing good in the real world becomes so much of a burden compared to the effortless virtual creation we're so used to, that we no longer even bother with it.

Stay informed. Stay plugged. But don't ever let the allure of being a floating conciousness on the collective ether of the net, stop you from participating as a human being.